Washington University offers $225,000 in start-up seed money

Dr. Adam Regelmann, founder of Quartzy, won $50,000 in the Olin Cup competition this year.

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Sep 13, 2010, 2:18pm CDTUpdatedSep 13, 2010, 2:18pm CDT

Washington University in St. Louis has $225,000 available in seed money through two start-up contests.

On Thursday, the school will kick off the sixth annual YouthBridge Social Enterprise and Innovation Competition, which doles out $150,000 to nonprofit ventures, and the 23rd annual Olin Cup, which awards $75,000 in cash and investment capital to commercial ventures.

YouthBridge Community Foundation is a major funder and partner in the YouthBridge SEIC, the largest social enterprise business plan contest in the United States. In its first five years, 23 competitors were awarded more than $650,000 in cash and in-kind services.

New and established nonprofits in St. Louis may enter the competition. Other funding partners include the Skandalaris Center, the Lutheran Foundation of St. Louis and the Daughters of Charity Foundation of St. Louis.

Teams entering the Olin Cup competition must include at least one Washington University student, faculty, staff or alumnus to be eligible for investment awards.

From the first elevator pitc” to the final presentation, entrepreneurs will face a panel of judges who are experts in entrepreneurship and innovation.

This year’s top Olin Cup winner was Quartzy, an online inventory management system for academic life-sciences labs that also will help with marketing and sales for vendors of research biochemicals and technology transfer offices that sell research reagents. Dr. Adam Regelmann, a resident in the Washington University School of Medicine, is the founder of the company that launched one year ago. Quartzy won $50,000.